VOTOR: conceptually simple remote voting against tiny tyrants

This paper seeks to address the need for fair elections in an adversarial online setting in ad hoc elections. A major issue with existing online solutions is reliance on authorities, which in practice are often instantiated by only one organisation. We propose a conceptually simple but highly robust approach for casting ballots over commodity anonymisers under minimal assumptions. While other schemes have followed a similar approach none have utilised the primitives to achieve so many desirable properties.

We then exploit this to construct a practical instantiation, called VOTOR---Voting over Tor---(one need not use Tor specifically), whose properties we show to compare favourably with prominent modern remote voting schemes such as Remotegrity and Helios. In particular, it shares the same coercion-resistance property, which we call weak receiptfreeness, as the latter two, but also provides privacy against election tellers. It is also conceptually simpler in its design than most modern schemes, and can be instantiated to allow voting credentials to persist from one election to the next without privacy attacks on past elections.